I’ve started work, I’m settled in, and I’m finally adjusted to the pacific time. Working at EALA is awesome, and if the rest of the summer is anything like the previous week, I’d love to come back in the future. Unfortunately, given the nature of the work, I can’t talk about what I’m doing because it’s an unannounced project. So instead I’ll talk about the rest of LA. Two Ferraris, a Mercedes McLauren, three Shelby Mustangs, four Bentleys…in a span of four blocks in Beverly Hills. Ate lunch at the Urth Caffe, an extremely overpriced Starbucks. I frequently use “overpriced” and “Starbucks” in the same sentence, but I never expected to use them in that context. $16 for a sandwich and a cup of tea. Close to the apartment complex where we live, my roommates and I found Brennan’s Pub. It’s a pretty standard Irish Pub, except on Thursday nights they have Turtle Racing – which is exactly what it sounds like. Eagerly awaiting Thursday night. The apartment complex itself, “Fountain Park,” is quite nice. Swimming pool, hot tub, gym, on-site pizza place, and lots of greenery. The rooms are on the small side (meant for two people instead of four) but it’s still got everything we need. Only been to In-N-Out Burger once so far. Supposedly there’s a better burger place around here called “Counter,” but we haven’t made it there yet. Found a crazy-awesome hole-in-the-wall Chinese place though. I utterly failed at bringing my camera along this weekend. I’ll attempt to redeem myself this...

“In no known language exists the phrase ‘beautiful like an airport.'” I’m sitting at gate B9 in Jacksonville waiting for my flight to take off to DC. United tried to convince me to change to a later flight three times at check in, so they must really want me to take a different airline. Like many airlines, they overbook every flight to maximize profit. I don’t really care what airline I fly as long as my bags make it to LA. Weather in Jacksonville has been less than desirable over the past week. Six days in a row of rain, with more rain in the forecast every day for the next ten days. The forecast for LA for the next ten days has partly cloudy skies with highs in the low 70’s and lows in the high 50’s. Providing United doesn’t delay my flight (lol) I should be getting to my new apartment in about 9...

I’ve wanted to write a proper postmortem for Audiball for some time now and I’ve been putting it off for far too long. Below, I try to summarize six months of my life into a few pages of text. Audiball was not a commercial success, nor was it groundbreaking in any way, but it was my experience with game development and I’ll always be proud of it. Read on if you’re interested in the game’s original vision, what sacrifices were made, what unexpected events changed development, how the game’s soundtrack was composed, how you can learn from my mistakes, and how an announcement trailer can be the longest fifty seconds of your life. Background Before starting development on Audiball, I was hooked on Jonathan Mak’s Everyday Shooter. Of course he’s already credited in the game for inspiration. It did a great job of using non-traditional sound effects in each level to blend with the game’s soundtrack. Each level used a different set of sound effects for shooting, explosions, combos, and just about everything else. It’s really what made the game exceptional as opposed to, well, your everyday shooter. Everyday Shooter At the same time, I was playing quite a bit of Rock Band with my roommates. The speakers on our TV blew out while we were in the middle of a difficult song, and while the guitarists and drummer were able to continue without a problem until it came back on, the singer promptly failed out. I guess I had never really considered that Rock Band is just a test of muscle memory. It’s why Guitar Hero is able to take away all the colors of the frets and players still know which buttons to push: the colors are irrelevant once you know where they are, it’s only the positions that matter. It was then that I got curious about the idea of focusing on the colors of the frets rather than their positions. It would be a completely different way of using the guitar controller. Of course, that also meant that no skills would carry over from any other guitar game. Playing Audiball for the first time would...

Haven’t made a proper update here since before GDC (which was awesome, by the way). I thought I’d write a bit about what I’m doing right now and what I’m doing this summer. I made a post over on the Indiecisive Games blog about Audiball’s performance on Xbox Live Community Games. It was about average for Community Games, and it was a great experience for our first project. The next Indiecisive project is well underway and will be “revealed” on April 30th when we submit it to Indiecade. On Friday I accepted an offer from EA LA for a “technical designer” internship position. I know that I’ll be working on an unannounced project on a smaller team, but that’s about it. I’m really exctied for the opportunity to work with some of the best minds in the industry – even more so than the amenities their campus has to offer. I will also likely be attending E3 this year because I’ll be in LA. It doesn’t seem too long ago that I was slobbering over the computers in my middle school library every time E3 and the hype that surrounds it rolled around. My classes finish at Tech on April 27, and I move out to LA on May 22. I’ll spend the bit of vacation I have between Jacksonville and Atlanta, but I’m glad I’ll get to stay busy. Finally, I put up a self-portrait of myself on the “About Me” page. The idea probably isn’t original. I haven’t seen it before, but that doesn’t mean a thing on the internet. I still had fun putting it together regardless. I’ll be sure to make an update to the site when I can say more about the Indiecisive project, and I’ll update whenever I can while I’m in LA to talk about everything except what I’m doing at work – I have a feeling EA wouldn’t like that....

Here’s another composition I made about a year ago for a music class at Tech. I was still learning Reason at the time, but it’s better than the last one I posted. The time I spent on projects in this class laid the foundation for Audiball’s soundtrack, which I’ll also post at a later date. Of course, Audiball’s soundtrack was based around procedural generation, so releasing it as static files is a little harder than it is with these. Download (3.17...